22 Comments Add your own

• 1. Mr. Baseball  |  December 26th, 2008 at 9:56 pm

  These are probably the same commentators who tell us the Vietnam War was a just cause and we would have won if only we had stayed and fought to win.

• 2. shawnnews  |  December 27th, 2008 at 4:14 am

  They aren’t very keen on Roosevelt over there. Sean Hannity talks about how Winston Churchill charged on to fight Hitler like George Bush charges on to fight terrorism.He also omits that it was Roosevelt, the liberal Democrat at his side.
  Partisan sources usually omit information embarrasing to their side or flattering to their opponents.

• 3. lyle nubbins  |  December 27th, 2008 at 6:51 am

  Is this a blog post? It is just one sentence. Oh well . .

  What is not false is that the Great Society put in motion the socialist ponzi entitlement scheme that is ruing our country today, and that his public works proects did not bring us out of the Depression (it was the War). There seems to be nostalgia for FDR, he like Kennedy is a Democratic icon that is invoked to imbue Obama with false gravitas and to lay the groundwork for more entitlemtn programs. In fact the Democratic party is simply a front for unions and the entitlement class, and far from being hisotric or noble its agenda is class warfare, union corruption and income redistribution at its basest. Just like the unions and their “legacy” retirees bankrupted the BIg Three and the airlines, and every other industry they have latched onto, the unions and the legacy federal entitlement programs are ruining our country as well.

• 4. Mike Carroll  |  December 27th, 2008 at 8:01 am

  I have no idea if “most historians” agree that The New Deal programs extended the depression but I do know that a good number of historians and economists are starting to come to that conclusion. That does not lessen Roosevelt’s status as a great President in my eyes and it certainly doesn’t hurt to have a debate about what worked and what did not work during the depression.
  Liberals are so sensitive. You really do need to toughen up.

• 5. snuss  |  December 27th, 2008 at 8:12 am

  I’ll post a review on: Amity Shlaes’s “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression”, which deals with this subject.

  Amity Shlaes’s “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression” is important for three reasons:

  1. It revisits the Great Depression, the 20th Century trauma that devastated the world economy, and applies the insights of modern economic theory to the actions of American policymakers of the time. Both Republican President Herbert Hoover’s ad hoc interventionism and Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs come in for serious, thoughtful criticism. Shlaes supports her insights with carefully researched historical evidence. The book is well-written, and simple to understand.

  2. The book has aroused modern passions (witness the rage expressed by some reviewers here) by challenging conventional wisdom about FDR’s New Deal. Conventional wisdom is that the New Deal rescued America from the Great Depression. Shlaes suggests, through her careful research and application of modern economic theory, that the New Deal failed to rescue the American economy from the Great Depression in fundamental respects, and in fact lengthened it and made it worse.

  3. Although a scholarly historical work, the book is controversial because of its implications. Many current government entitlement programs are based upon the New Deal. If the New Deal failed in fundamental respects, as Shlaes suggests, that failure calls into question the premises upon which many existing government programs are based. If those premises are wrong, then there is no justification for the programs themselves. The failure of the New Deal knocks the foundation out from under much of the platform of the modern Democratic Party.

  In a time of renewed economic turmoil, these issues again become important. Should we look to the New Deal for guidance in economic policy-making, as many in the modern Democratic Party are suggesting? Not if Amity Shlaes’s historical insights are correct, and the New Deal was a miserable failure.

  Source: http://store.math.com/Books-9-0060936428-The_Forgotten_Man_A_New_History_of_the_Great_Depression.html

• 6. akalou  |  December 27th, 2008 at 12:16 pm

  I was actually going to read this article until I saw that it was written by Pat Cunningham. Forget it.

• 7. Craig Knauss  |  December 27th, 2008 at 12:27 pm

  I’m not going to say that everything Roosevelt did was a roaring success. But a lot of his programs have had lasting, POSITIVE effects. Look around. There are still a lot of remnants of his programs in existance, almost 70 years later. Things we take for granted, like roads, bridges, schools, parks, locks and dams, reservoirs, hydroelectric facilities, etc. These projects provided our infrastructure for many years, in addition to providing hope when we needed it most. On the other side, Fox News, and its followers, provide nothing except criticism.

• 8. shawnnews  |  December 27th, 2008 at 1:25 pm

  Roosevelt was “the New Deal” and Johnson was “the Great Society.” Government programs are only as good as the ideas behind them and the people running them.
  I am skeptical about “new” histories. They appear to be written for an agenda or an untapped market. If you ever read about Christianity, you have a whole series of alternate histories:
  Jesus’ love affair with Mary Magdalene.
  Jesus’ didn’t exist
  Jesus’ the Marxist revolutionary
  The New Deal was really a failure, huh? I bet some author will write something about how the country was ruined since 1933 until Ronald Reagan restored it to it’s greatness.
  Junk.

• 9. Orlando Clay  |  December 27th, 2008 at 6:37 pm

  shawnnews wrote: “I bet some author will write something about how the country was ruined since 1933 until Ronald Reagan restored it to it’s greatness.”

  Thanks a lot, Shawn. You probably just gave supposed self-taught economist and right-wing nut job Glenn Beck the idea for his next book of conservative prattle for the mentally deprived.

• 10. unmanager  |  December 27th, 2008 at 6:56 pm

  Funny how SNuss rails against “liberals” rewriting history to fit THEIR agenda…so different when it’s a WingnutTHEORY he embraces….

• 11. snuss  |  December 27th, 2008 at 7:38 pm

  It isn’t a theory that the U.S. economy didn’t make any significant recovery progress, until Lend-Lease production for WWII started, contrary to Liberal MoonBat beliefs.

• 12. Craig Knauss  |  December 27th, 2008 at 10:18 pm

  Do you have a link for that one, Snuss? You have links for everything else. Perhaps you could quote Ann Coulter or some authority like that? Maybe that conservative know-nothing Glen Beck? He’s famous for stupid comments.

• 13. shawnnews  |  December 27th, 2008 at 11:45 pm

  Orlando– I think I read an idea like this or similar from Ann Coulter already. It’s not a new idea.I think it’s mentioned in Al Franken’s funny “Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them.”

• 14. snuss  |  December 28th, 2008 at 9:41 am

  You MUST be desperate, to use Al Franken as a factual source.

• 15. gunlogic  |  December 28th, 2008 at 9:59 am

  Then again, everyone could try actually reading The Forgotten Man, and then maturely discuss its points (and factual references) with Snuss.

  But then I know how libs hate to back down and concede a point, let alone crack a book not on their pre-approved reading list.

• 16. shawnnews  |  December 28th, 2008 at 1:46 pm

  Franken is a joke man. But one of the things he makes fun of in the book is Ann Coulter’s partisan view on history which can be exaggerated comically to “Since 1933 the US was a mess until Ronald Reagan stepped in and single handedly beat the communists without anyone’s help.”
  However, for the most part my take on her is that she doesn’t think she is exaggerating. People like that are unintentional clowns.

• 17. snuss  |  December 28th, 2008 at 3:31 pm

  Quote: “Do you have a link for that one, Snuss?”

  The end to the Great Depression came about in 1941 with America’s entry into World War II.
  Source: http://www.americaslibrary.gov/cgi-bin/page.cgi/jb/wwii

  For the United States, World War II and the Great Depression constituted the most important economic event of the twentieth century. The war’s effects were varied and far-reaching. The war decisively ended the depression itself.
  Source: http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/tassava.WWII

  However, the extent of the Great Depression was so great that government programs alone could not end it. Unemployment remained in the double-digits until 1941, when the U.S. entry into World War II created defense-related jobs.
  Source: http://useconomy.about.com/od/grossdomesticproduct/p/1929_Depression.htm

  For a more detailed account, which says the recovery didn’t start until AFTER WWII, try: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/GreatDepression.html

• 18. unmanager  |  December 28th, 2008 at 5:26 pm

  Still obvious the THEORY is based on a PARTISAN rewriting of historical FACTS…
  FDR-haters simply ignore any inconvenient facts, like how recovery began relatively quickly after he took office and that his first two terms saw the most rapid peacetime GDP growth in American history.
  Getting back to FDR, investment and thus growth resumed in the last quarter of 1933, which was followed by 11%, 9%, and 13% GDP growth in 1934, ‘35, and ‘36 respectively. This is by far the most rapid 3-year period of growth in American history.
  Wanta go PARTISAN on FACTS???
  http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1519.html
  “The Republicans’ domination of Congress throughout the 1920s afforded them ample opportunity to enact legislation that was acceptable to the business and financial communities. Action had been taken on the tariff in 1922 by the Harding administration (see Fordney-McCumber Tariff), but special interests were clamoring for a new law when Herbert Hoover took office….Many historians also have maintained that the high U.S. rates exerted a dramatic impact on Europe as well. Manufacturers on the continent found it difficult to market their goods in America, which contributed to the former allies’ increased difficulty with meeting war debt obligations, and stagnating international trade.”

• 19. shawnnews  |  December 29th, 2008 at 8:56 am

  “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
  –attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan

• 20. Milton Waddams  |  December 29th, 2008 at 9:41 am

  Snuss: “It revisits the Great Depression, the 20th Century trauma that devastated the world economy, and applies the insights of modern economic theory to the actions of American policymakers of the time.”

  More likely, it applies the theories of Milton Friedman and his Chicago School of Economics, whose forte was to go into South American and other developing countries and encourage tincup dictators (For example, Pinochet) to sell all government property to foreign companies and starve the people.

• 21. Craig Knauss  |  December 29th, 2008 at 9:10 pm

  Snuss,

  NOBODY said that Roosevelt ended the Great Depression. I am quite aware that WWII ended it for good. However, Roosevelt’s policies put people to work doing things for the greater good of the country and giving people some hope for the future. Did you miss where I said Roosevelt’s programs created, “…roads, bridges, schools, parks, locks and dams, reservoirs, hydroelectric facilities, etc. These projects provided our infrastructure for many years.”? Or did you just blow past that part? And I doubt Amity Shlaes’s “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression” gives any credit to the continued economic contributions of projects such as Grand Coulee Dam, which produces as much electricity as FOUR nuclear power plants and irrigation water for thousands of square miles. How much economic benefit did we derive from WWII? And does Shlaes give any credit to Roosevelt’s programs for preparing the country for the effort that would be needed to ramp up for WWII. Do you really believe we could fight a war with bread lines?

• 22. snuss  |  December 29th, 2008 at 9:40 pm

  The question is when the Great Depression ended, not how many parks and bridges the CCC built. It didn’t end untill WWII.

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